On the morning of 3 January Nietzsche had just left his lodgings when he saw a cab-driver beating his horse in the Piazza Carlo Alberto. Tearfully, the philosopher flung his arms around the animal's neck, and then collapsed. The small crowd that gathered around him attracted Davide Fino, who had his lodger carried back to his room. After lying unconscious or at least motionless for a while on a sofa, Nietzsche became boisterous, singing, shouting, thumping at the piano. He probably thought he was clowning deliberately.… But the 'inspired clowning' which had already been hard to control by the end of November was now in unchallengeable possession of his mind. He wrote notes to the King of Italy ('My beloved Umberto'), the royal house of Baden ('My children'), and the Vatican Secretary of State. He would go to Rome on Tuesday, he said, to meet the pope and the princes of Europe, except for the Hohenzollerns. He advised the other German princes to ostracize them, for the Reich was still the enemy of German culture. Writing to Gast, Brandes and Meta von Salis, Nietzsche signed himself 'The Crucified', and writing to Burckhardt, Overbeck and Cosima Wagner, signed himself 'Dionysus'. The note to Meta runs: 'The world is transfigured, for God is on the earth. Do you not see how all the heavens are rejoicing? I have just seized possession of my kingdom, am throwing the pope into prison, and having Wilhelm, Bismarck and Stocker shot.' The note to Burckhardt starts: 'That was the little joke for which I condone my boredom at having created a world.'
There is a prima facie case to be made for Nietzsche's early and abiding interest in the rhetorical aspect of all discourse. Much of that case has already been made by Paul de Man in Allegories of Reading and has become widely known and frequently discussed. Because of de Man and others associated with the "new Nietzsche," who come mainly from France, many readers are now familiar with the formerly obscure little fragment "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral Sense" ("Über Wahrheit und Lüge im aussermoralischen Sinn") and its relation to Nietzsche's lecture notes on rhetoric made in the early 1870s. These documents give us a clear sense of Nietzsche's transition from philology to philosophy in the period from 1868 to 1876, when he was in effect working as both philosopher and professional philologist at the same time. Consideration of classical rhetoric as expounded by scholars such as Richard Volkmann and Gustav Gerber provided Nietzsche with important materials from which could be built a bridge between the study of language and the reexamination of some of philosophy's fundamental questions.
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